Part 5

Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate “Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think), a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me, and I set about cataloguing books for them.

I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought. And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could, and so I went to work.

I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,” I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work, that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places. The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,” by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views, plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash, Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal.

There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well, indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising” is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together. The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort of books that have illustrations by Fragonard.

“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no objection to your saying so.”

It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held “Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they sold. They dealt in rare books.

Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was, had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to Brother Ned as I entered.

“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson, and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr. Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing these things and a _wrong_ way.”

Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also: that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant treatment I received.

Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr. Edward,” and began to translate without more ado.

And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master. But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master, and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore: poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it, and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about translating, not troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic “M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer, at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator. Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate.

And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer? Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty, the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the “moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken” his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”

“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”

And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done, you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter, nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things, which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry, Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle, and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old “Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness. There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect; the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms. And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.

And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:

“Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time. No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny the existence of either, since he has walked from point to point in one and seen the other measured before his eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.

“It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial: it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe; and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face confronts you.”

And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery, and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say, in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter; he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the period as a whole without knowing Casanova.

So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’ time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages.

And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued. On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True, thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street, Bow Street, York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a month; and yet....”

Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text? Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall be in danger of hell fire.

I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business, though they were masters and I was man.

And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I ceased to be in the employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London, I think I must have had in bank something between three and four thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom. It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view, though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe, only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them: one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly, frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling concern--in City waters.

But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers. Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said:

“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ... circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work; yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ... altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and, in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ... _revise_ your manuscript.”

“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I don’t think I can make it any better.”

_Chapter VII_

Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult, but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words: “iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for “cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns, of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque “outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them, on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue. And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else. He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said.